His apple trees are perfect marvels. Some of them bear upwards of two hundred different kinds of apples, and he says it is comparatively easy to produce an apple of any color, texture, size, flavor, and sweetness desired.
Think what Nature has taught to such a man. He is not what you would call a supereducated man in books; but he has read Nature as few men in the history of the world have done, and she has revealed many of her most intimate secrets to him. And as you talk with him you find in this quiet, unassuming, sweet-spirited, gentle-hearted man a breadth, a largeness, a sweep of soul that are rare.
And Nature gives this same largeness to a woman as well as a man. Women who get into the bigness of the out-of-doors get away from feminine pettinesses just as surely as men do from their narrownesses and prejudices. I have two women friends in California (or had, until one passed on), both of them expert and scientific florists. One lived at San Buena Ventura, and the other at San Diego. The names of Mrs. Theodosia Shepard and Miss Kate Sessions are known throughout the world. Both women determined to devote their lives to a scientific study, _out in the garden_, of plant life, and each has therefore done things, achieved results that have made her world-famed. How much better this, than to live the narrow, contracted life of most women.
Another woman friend, Mrs. Sarah Plummer Lemmon, wife of the well-known botanist, and herself a botanist known to the whole scientific world, for years accompanied her husband in his expeditions throughout the wildest parts of Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Mexico. I doubt whether there is a person living who has so real and intimate a knowledge of all this country as has this brave and intrepid woman, who, when Apaches were on the warpath, calmly and steadfastly sustained her husband in his scientific work. In storms and perils, in danger from wild animals and wilder men, away from all luxuries and comforts and often deprived of what most people call necessities, this woman communed with Nature and has thereby grown into a large, commanding, powerful, all-embracing soul, as much above the average woman in intellect as an athlete is above a baby.